FAQ: Sending Bulk Emails to Gmail

[serge_l]

Hi everyone,

If you send a lot of email (think confirmations, marketing, etc...) new rules for spam prevention will be in place starting in February.

The Gmail team has gathered the most frequent questions and have answered them here. 

Please note, as stated in the FAQ, this change is for reaching gmail.com accounts, not for Workspace accounts yet.

Is there an important question that we have not covered?

[icrew]

A few questions that I don't think are addressed in the FAQs (background: I help run Workspace for UC Berkeley, where we have ~220,000 active accounts, with many "clever" undergraduates --and staffers!--that sometimes do things that are less-than-clever):

• Will the Workspace Admins get any warning if their domain is about to go over the 0.3% spam threshold?
• Will Workspace Admins be able to see which of their senders are getting marked as spam, pushing them towards that threshold, so we can respond proactively?
• If we do get blocked, what will the process be to get back into Google's good graces? How long will that take?
• If a host gets blocked, is it just the one sender domain (e.g., foo.example.edu) that gets blocked, or does it apply to all senders/hosts/workspace instances in that TLD (example.edu)?
• How does Google Groups factor into this?
  • Think about a Group with many thousands of members. What happens if a spammer sends a message to one of those large groups? Does the domain whose group it is get penalized?
  • Does Google Groups' unsubscribe comply with the one-click-unsubscribe requirement?

Thanks!

Ian

[stein1]

Regarding one-click unsubscribe... are mailto unsubscribes (according to RFC 2369) rather than HTTPS URL unsubscribes (according to RFC 8058) sufficient to meet the one-click unsubscribe requirement?  The FAQ uses the word "should", not "must", regarding the RFC 8058 implementation, so that implies to me that RFC 8058 is not a requirement and RFC 2369 compliance is sufficient.  I'd like some clarification on this.

Thanks.

Seth

[jsw2]

I have a question around one-click unsubscribe that is poorly addressed. In the Email sender guidelines it says "your marketing and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe" but in the FAQ it says "One-click unsubscribe is required only for marketing and promotional messages". The use of subscribed in the guidelines has created a discussion in the Moodle LMS community on if one-click is needed for emails generated when users are subscribed to forums. Can the language between the two be made consistent. I think the language from the FAQ is what is intended rather than the broader language from the guidelines. Note the emails include in body links (e.g. Unsubscribe from forum, Change your forum digest preferences). While I am following the Moodle discussion, as that is the LMS we support, I think this would apply to similar messages from any LMS.